Always and Never

As I was growing up in the United States in the 1950s and 60s, it was my mother who was my main guide to the world and how it works. My father taught me useful skills, such as how to saw and how to hammer a nail into a piece of wood, and even an alternate way to tie my shoes, but when it came to questions about social behavior he was largely quiet and my mother dominated.

The messages usually included the word "always" or "never" as in:

"Never comb your hair at the table."

"Always cover your mouth when you yawn."

"Never walk around barefoot."

"Always write a thank-you note when you receive a gift."

These messages were reinforced with strong words about anyone who happened to ignore these rules.

"It was a filthy coffee shop. At the booth next to us there was a woman who kept combing her hair."

"She's old enough, she should know better."

"They're nice kids, but I don't know why their mother lets them run around without their shoes. They'll grow up with huge calluses on the soles of their feet."

"Your aunt called. She wondered if you got home safely after your visit to her. She never heard anything from you."

Oops. That last one was directed to me. I had to write a very long and apologetic thank you after that. It was a variation on the rule I hadn't recognized. You also must always write to thank someone for their hospitality when you travel to visit them. This one stung sharply because I was already "old enough to know better."

When a teenager travels on AFS as an exchange student they are also "old enough" to have internalized most of these rules. They know more or less instinctively how to behave in terms of their own culture's expectations, though even in their own culture's terms they may slip up a bit now and then. The astonishing thing that happens on the exchange program is that suddenly they have a different set of cultural expectations to meet. But since they are no longer little children, and probably don't speak the language that well, they often don't hear the "always" and "never" rules from their host family.

And how will the family politely tell the exchange student if he or she has slipped up and broken one of these rules? It can be a delicate matter.

"Vera," an exchange student from Germany, realized that there was some issue with the family rules about her plans to visit friends she had met who lived in what would be seen as a poorer, rougher part of town - a favela in Brazil. But the family didn't directly tell her not to go, and Vera's reaction was this:

...Meanwhile, I give in only rarely, for if they cannot tell me a clear “no,” then they must accept that I don’t hear a “no.”

On the other hand, for a US student in Ecuador who took a 1/2 hour long shower one day, the direct approach used by his host family was just a little embarrassing, though apparently necessary.

My family sat down with me and slowly explained why I can’t take long showers and that everything was ok but they needed me to follow this rule. My Spanish wasn’t too good then but they took their time and explained so I understood.... I felt a little foolish for not understanding them the first time they explained the rules.

As a German girl in Hong Kong discovered, home and host culture rules are sometimes exactly the opposite:

Their eating habits are quite different. For example, it is permissible to belch out loud, but if you have to sneeze, you must apologize. In my country it is just the opposite.

Here is a small clip from a video created by AFS Germany showing how some opposite expectations about table manners may play out. We used this in the online learning program we created for the AFS students, which is being piloted tested by AFS-USA and AFS Malaysia in the coming months.

The credits for the video clip go to the volunteers involved: Pongrachot Meesaiyat, Helmut Hein, Monika Vogel (the main actors) and Conni Emmert, the camerawoman and producer.

AFS has other materials to help host families and their exchange students discover where their rules may be different. One package we have available on the web in English and Spanish is designed to be used just before and in the weeks right after the students arrive in their host countries.

Share Your Own Rules
Lately in the blogsphere I find frequent invitations asking anyone and everyone to post their own variations of some sort of list. I usually resist -- I don't have that much time on my hands -- but I would be interested in hearing from people in a variety of cultures about the rules you were taught as a child and how you were taught them, and how you came to realize that these rules didn't actually apply in other cultures. It doesn't have to take the form of "7 Rules My Mother (or My Father) Taught Me" but that would be fine. A grandparent or a teacher might also have been the main source of your understanding of your culture's expectations for your behavior.

Consider yourself tagged. If you want to make such a list and share it, you can respond to the blog here, or you can email me at betsy.hansel@afs.org.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

Online Cultures

I have recently been heavily involved in setting up an online intercultural learning program for our participants. One of the last pieces to put in place was a document of guidelines for blog and forum posts on the site. This is a typical statement of general rules about what can and cannot be posted, and states that the moderators have the right to pull off posts that we think are offensive or inappropriate. It is an explicit statement of how we expect people to behave in this online culture.

Like all sites, there are also some structural constraints to what people can and cannot do on the site, and these are difficult to change. We completed this pilot project with a very limited budget, but with the rapid evolution of the Internet, it makes no sense to spend years developing projects, and many very good Internet tools are practically free. Most important is to be able to complete the work in a matter of months or else the technology you were working with will be obsolete before you're through.

So even before the first students start to work with this site, we are already thinking of what needs to improve. This week, if all goes well, the first few students will start using it and I hope they will provide some feedback soon. The first students on line will be from the USA. The second group will be from Malaysia, starting shortly afterwards. This is the pilot test. We hope that the students will continue working with the program, the forum and blogs throughout their experience, from before they leave home, while they are abroad, and through the months after they return home. Our decisions about what to include are based on input from

Here are the icons we use throughout the program:

Even the icons are likely to receive different reactions from different cultures, let alone the structure behind them in which the participant is guided by an online "passport," and from there is led to specific questions to discuss in a forum, to a place to think things through privately in words and images in a portfolio, and to a place for reasonably open self-expression in a blog that can be shared with the community of students participating in the exchange programs.

The idea is that eventually the text portions would be translated and adapted by the various countries, but that the blogs and forums would be common spaces, and all students would have common themes that they work with. We intend and hope that they will learn from each other guided by our content. There are, of course a few technical issues that still need to be ironed out, but in theory they will work. I am more worried about getting the participants interacting than about working through the technical constraints to allow this to happen.

Over the past year or so, I have been talking to Jon Rubin of the COIL center at SUNY Purchase about the cultural variations and cross-cultural misunderstandings that are specific to online communication. The COIL center's mission is to promote and improve collaborative learning projects and courses, using technology to connect campuses in different countries. The interests overlap considerably with AFS, in particular with our soon-to-launch online intercultural learning project.

Recently I read some articles about cultural differences relevant to the challenge of creating a multinational educational web site.

1. Pfeil, Zaphiris and Ang, "Cultural Differences in Collaborative Authoring of Wikipedia" comes with the warning that different cultures structure information differently, which is in fact one of the points we make in the on line program. While we anticipated translation and adaptation by each sending country. It will be even possible for countries to change the order of pages to some extent if needed, but probably a full reorganization for each country is not going to work.
2. A. Xie, et al., (in press) Cross-cultural influence on communication effectiveness and user reminded me that people from cultures that normally use very rich, high-context communication may have trouble with a web site that is mostly text (like this blog). So our new online learning program has a lot of text but also videos, and plenty of images and graphics. But we may still be too text dependent. And yet: entire novels in Japan, some wildly popular, have been written via cell phone text message. The content is more important than the medium. But maybe a video will help. Here's one of the clips we put in the site that came from a larger work "Snapshots: When Cultures Interact" that was produced by our European umbrella organization, EFIL, the European Federation for Intercultural Learning (made possible through grants from the Council of Europe, the Anna Lindh Foundation, and Marco Balich. See: http://www.snapshots2008.eu/)
    
 
3. Richardson and Smith, (2007) The influence of high/low-context culture and power distance on choice of communication media found that Japanese and US students do choose different media for communicating with teachers, but also highlighted the difficulty of measuring these things. For example, they supposed that students might choose the most effective or preferred means of communication, but this was not borne out in their data. Instead they suggest that cultures also attach symbolic value to the act of sending email, telephoning, or meeting face-to-face, and people may choose based on the symbolic meaning. Written text may have more authority than a phone call in one culture, while an email message may be seen having a less serious purpose. Face-to-face meetings may seem like the most important communication, but people in many cultures have been known to interrupt the conversation with the person they are with to answer the phone.

With these differences, it is hard not to imagine that forum postings and blogging styles will also vary by culture, with some cultures more likely to jump in with encouraging responses for others, and others more likely to look for a humorous or ironic comment.

In launching our self-directed online educational program, I have several worries:

1. Will the text sections appear too SERIOUS?
2. Will the forum or blog appear intimidating?
3. Will the images seem too cliched or sentimental?
4. Will the students be motivated to push the "CONTINUE" buttons?
5. Will the learning they take away come close to what we intend? 

I eagerly and nervously await the first exchange students.

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS International

Power Distance

I don't talk very often about the cultural value dimensions of Geert Hofstede, mostly because the research that originally led to the discovery of these factors is fairly old now, and the specific numeric values attributed to each national culture are specific to that time period. For example, in terms of the "Uncertainty Avoidance" dimension: I am certain that the numerous law suits and new regulations in the USA over the last several decades has made the US as a society much less willing to assume risk, though of course we see what happened when the banking industry was able to bundle a lot of different risks into financial investment packages. There are different realms to risk taking. A professional gambler may always wear a seat belt when traveling by car.

In short, one number on a scale never gives a full sense of how to characterize a society's values, though it can be useful for comparison. Here is a brief clip of Geert Hofstede from a video produced by EFIL, the European Federation of Intercultural Learning, which is an umbrella organization of AFS partners in Europe, and made possible through grants from the Council of Europe, the Anna Lindh Foundation, and Marco Balich. See: http://www.snapshots2008.eu/

Lately I've been thinking about Power Distance, the Hofstede dimension that deals with the extent to which a society accepts inequality. I recently watched a television show dramatizing the life of John Adams who represented Massachusetts in the Continental Congress of the 13 colonies in America that in 1776 declared their independence from Britain. Watching the supposed drafting of this Declaration of Independence, we see an imagined Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson discussing the final wording: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, ..." Of course, women were not self-evidently equal, nor were the slaves. Both these points were touched on by characters in the show, of course, since it is a 21st Century USA production. But I came away with the sense that this equality is still not self-evident.

But equality nevertheless is part of the US belief system, though perhaps less so than, say, in Denmark or Austria or New Zealand, according to the data from Hofstede. Exchange students from the USA or countries who similarly have a strong belief that all people are supposed to be equal sometimes find themselves in a country where the Power Distance dimension is higher -- where inequality is accepted as a fact of life, and some people are expected to hold more power than others. Some are expected to lead and make decisions, and some are expected to serve. It's not that anyone particularly judges this to be a "good" thing, but in a place like India, for example, what's self-evident is that all people are NOT equal in basic ways like wealth, education, and status.

In the USA, to the extent we believe that all people are in fact equal, we may then blame those who seem less capable for not taking full advantage of their possibilities because we also believe very strongly in individualism -- that each person is in charge of his or her own destiny in many important ways. For those who see the inequality that exists in fact in terms of opportunity, in terms of access to education and resources, all of this blame is terribly unfair.

Of course, while there are obvious differences in power that can be found within even the low power distance cultures, but the power differences between countries and between ethnic groups must also be taken into account in understanding the context of the relationships you may be trying to build across cultures. Trust and respect are the essential tools for cross cultural communication because there usually is some element of power difference if not a competition for power. It's not enough to just know the other culture and its norms to build a relationship. 

Bettina Hansel

Director of Intercultural Education and Research

AFS Intercultural Programs